21 replies to this topic

[Douglas grizzly]

The two biggest problems in qp are in this order as i see them.
1. team mates that either dont know what to do or dont care to play properly. example running out of building in river city to hang around the citadel and seemingly dont know what to do while they are being surrounded and cut down or they intentionally block you from moving foward or backward like some players i know and i cant mention.

2 tier ones and tier twos who are too cowardly to drop as a single but who drop as a group so they can curb stomp lower levels because they need to stroke their egos and pad their kds or ones who shoot through buildings and or around corners. personally in this latter situation they need to be blocked from dropping against lower levels unless its fp bec in qp a tier one group skews the match way too much.

[Bud Crue]

Douglas grizzly, on 11 February 2025 - 03:35 PM, said:

...dont care to play properly.

...too cowardly to drop as a single but who drop as a group so they can curb stomp lower levels...ws the match way too much.

Oh, ffs.

[Hat]

Douglas grizzly, on 11 February 2025 - 03:35 PM, said:

The two biggest problems in qp are in this order as i see them.
1. team mates that either dont know what to do or dont care to play properly. example running out of building in river city to hang around the citadel and seemingly dont know what to do while they are being surrounded and cut down or they intentionally block you from moving foward or backward like some players i know and i cant mention.

2 tier ones and tier twos who are too cowardly to drop as a single but who drop as a group so they can curb stomp lower levels because they need to stroke their egos and pad their kds or ones who shoot through buildings and or around corners. personally in this latter situation they need to be blocked from dropping against lower levels unless its fp bec in qp a tier one group skews the match way too much.

Do you seriously think we have a choice in the matter with who we play against? The simple solution is for you to just play better and stop whining on the forums and hackusating every single person with more than 1/2 a braincell.

[pbiggz]

Douglas grizzly, on 11 February 2025 - 03:35 PM, said:

The two biggest problems in qp are in this order as i see them.
1. team mates that either dont know what to do or dont care to play properly. example running out of building in river city to hang around the citadel and seemingly dont know what to do while they are being surrounded and cut down or they intentionally block you from moving foward or backward like some players i know and i cant mention.

2 tier ones and tier twos who are too cowardly to drop as a single but who drop as a group so they can curb stomp lower levels because they need to stroke their egos and pad their kds or ones who shoot through buildings and or around corners. personally in this latter situation they need to be blocked from dropping against lower levels unless its fp bec in qp a tier one group skews the match way too much.

Having friends doesnt make you a cheater/coward and your need to externalize all your losses suggests to me that you are not willing to consider the things that actually contribute to said losses.

[Tiy0s]

Douglas, there are a few problems with your two issues you see in QP.

1. There are players of many different skill levels. Some better than you, some worse than you. As annoying as you may find it to have players who are lower skill than you on your team, odds are the skill distribution of the enemy team is similar to your team. The only constant on your team is yourself and I would focus on that rather than your teammates who you have no control over and are playing for enjoyment. The same as you are.

2. You've posted a lot about your perception of tier 1 and tier 2 players and the problems you think they cause in this game. I dislike this. The first issue is that you, as a player, have no way of knowing the tier of any other players in your match unless they voluntarily hand that information over. Secondly, there are tier gates in place to prevent too much mixing of the tiers. A tier 1 player can only be matched with as far low as tier 3 unless the game population at the time is low enough that it cannot make a match with just players tier 1-3. Which has happened but it's often rare. There are safeguards in place.

You often speak as if all tier 1 and 2 players are the same and you have perfect understanding of them. They are players, just like you. They may like playing with friends or playing solo. They may prefer to play long range, short range, light, or assault mechs. I would appreciate it if you stopped grouping and judging players together by a tier bar that you cannot even see on other players, but are rather projecting on to them.

As for the shooting through walls and around the corners, you have done this in many other posts as well to much more blatant effects. I would like to remind you that accusing players of cheating is against the Terms of Service. If you have evidence of players cheating or using external software, please email support. We investigate every claim seriously. However public accusations are a violation of the game rules and Terms of Service.

[Douglas grizzly]

Hat Trick, on 11 February 2025 - 05:24 PM, said:

Do you seriously think we have a choice in the matter with who we play against? The simple solution is for you to just play better and stop whining on the forums and hackusating every single person with more than 1/2 a braincell.

i only talk about what i see in every match it seems

[Douglas grizzly]

Tiy0s, on 11 February 2025 - 05:37 PM, said:

Douglas, there are a few problems with your two issues you see in QP.

1. There are players of many different skill levels. Some better than you, some worse than you. As annoying as you may find it to have players who are lower skill than you on your team, odds are the skill distribution of the enemy team is similar to your team. The only constant on your team is yourself and I would focus on that rather than your teammates who you have no control over and are playing for enjoyment. The same as you are.

2. You've posted a lot about your perception of tier 1 and tier 2 players and the problems you think they cause in this game. I dislike this. The first issue is that you, as a player, have no way of knowing the tier of any other players in your match unless they voluntarily hand that information over. Secondly, there are tier gates in place to prevent too much mixing of the tiers. A tier 1 player can only be matched with as far low as tier 3 unless the game population at the time is low enough that it cannot make a match with just players tier 1-3. Which has happened but it's often rare. There are safeguards in place.

You often speak as if all tier 1 and 2 players are the same and you have perfect understanding of them. They are players, just like you. They may like playing with friends or playing solo. They may prefer to play long range, short range, light, or assault mechs. I would appreciate it if you stopped grouping and judging players together by a tier bar that you cannot even see on other players, but are rather projecting on to them.

As for the shooting through walls and around the corners, you have done this in many other posts as well to much more blatant effects. I would like to remind you that accusing players of cheating is against the Terms of Service. If you have evidence of players cheating or using external software, please email support. We investigate every claim seriously. However public accusations are a violation of the game rules and Terms of Service.

i dont accuse individual people of cheating and as far as shooting through walls etc i cant do it bec i never can make that happen. i have to use clean lines of sight for shooting. i get tired of being curb stomped so many times. I know i harp about stuff but i only gripe about things i see. and yes i have reported people botyh in game and through email about stuff that is blatant.

Edited by Douglas grizzly, 11 February 2025 - 06:32 PM.

[pbiggz]

Douglas grizzly, on 11 February 2025 - 06:30 PM, said:

i dont accuse individual people of cheating and as far as shooting through walls etc i cant do it bec i never can make that happen. i have to use clean lines of sight for shooting. i get tired of being curb stomped so many times.

You gotta take a break man. It feels like crap to lose over and over. There's no shame in taking a break. My relationship with this game is far far healthier when I come to it when I want to and enjoy as much of it as I want to. I used to play basically just this game, and i burned out far harder, for far longer.

[Rosarius]

Douglas grizzly, on 11 February 2025 - 03:35 PM, said:

The two biggest problems in qp are in this order as i see them.
1. team mates that either dont know what to do or dont care to play properly.

It's not that big of a deal. Some players just take longer to learn the game than others. Some players have dropped nearly twenty thousand matches and still barely have an average win loss ratio of 0.90. It is what it is

[Duke Falcon]

Douglas grizzly, on 11 February 2025 - 03:35 PM, said:

The two biggest problems in qp are in this order as i see them.
1. team mates that either dont know what to do or dont care to play properly. example running out of building in river city to hang around the citadel and seemingly dont know what to do while they are being surrounded and cut down or they intentionally block you from moving foward or backward like some players i know and i cant mention.

2 tier ones and tier twos who are too cowardly to drop as a single but who drop as a group so they can curb stomp lower levels because they need to stroke their egos and pad their kds or ones who shoot through buildings and or around corners. personally in this latter situation they need to be blocked from dropping against lower levels unless its fp bec in qp a tier one group skews the match way too much.

First of all, most players play to have fun. For some it means running meme-builds. Some like to try new approaches what may proven disastrous. Some learning slowly or have disabilities - what you may unaware of - to prevent them to react and aim like a T5000+ terminator. Or they just have sh!tload of lag\ping\slow game rig. You can hardly tell for sure.
Okay, there are interesting things. Blocking sometimes happen but - according my experiences - it is very rarely intentional but more likely accidental. However when someone lay a happy alpha in your back right in the dropzone and dash away without a "sorry", that's another question. There are such dumbasses, sure, still, as someone already noted: We cannot choose whom we play together. We have a bugged, barely-functioning match-maker for that (blame it, it hardly works at all).
"Tier2-1-0 groups of 23" stompa-ovah-meh is starting to be boring. If it happens it happens because of alts. Some have alts and some sure exploit it. But generally you would hardly meet high-tier players 'till you left T4. Except if you circumvent tier-gates (group with high-tier players to get high-tier matches). I tried it with friends, fun some ways. But a group of super-tier players won't magically appear in low-tier matches (except a bunch of alts banded together but they quickly rise through tiers anyways). FP is exceptation but there is QP to train for that mode (hint: You would barely ready for FP, so forfeit QP and dive into real fun!).
Hacks and cheats and tricks from the sleeves... I mean, c'mon! Collision maps are utterly insane on maps, dontcha tell me it's something new! Just because something seems a solid object it's not means it is! Some players play long enough to know such "bugs" and exploit them. That's no cheat nor hack but a backdoor. Sure, there are cheaters, no game is devoit of them, general thumb-rule of the universe. But hard to believe that cheaters come in your way in every second games. Not to mention that some players exploit ping or lag what is also not cheat. And if you want, there is an official, PGI-sanctioned way to negate any skill-effects: a user.cfg where you could remove vegetation and reduce effects to the ground so you can literally spot everyone from the other corner of the map. Of course use such settings mean someone has zero skill otherwise noone would need such a blatant help!
But if you really want to name a trouble with QP: HITREG FFS! QP has some excellently disastrous hitreg lately (not experienced it in FP so far). Not sure if there is a way PGI may could (if even cares) to fix hitreg a bit. But hitreg could be bullsh!t beyond imagination (You know, when point-blank range your 80+ alpha just disappear without turn enemy's armour from blue to yellow, just for example but it seems it tides somehow to SRMs...).

[Bud Crue]

Manboobs-sama, on 18 February 2025 - 02:07 AM, said:

When you do it a certain way, it ABSOLUTELY does. Running with a Div A 4-man is without question cheating, and I cannot even possibly imagine the fool who would defend it as not.

When I see this **** in QP I report all 4 of you ***** as cheating every single time. I don't care what kind of silly mechs you are running to "Self-balance", you are ******* cheating. You are guaranteeing yourselves a win, and thus, removing the agency and fun of the other 20 players in the match.

Until Groups are removed, there is no such thing as balance There is no such thing as fairness, there is no such thing as fun, in QP.

Nothing anyone in the Cauldron has done has made this game any more balanced or fair.

Split groups, or just delete the whole god damn game from existence.

There can never be an in-between that is fair or fun.

What exactly is a "Div A 4-man" and who are these players that make up such groups?
I haven't paid attention to the comp scene in a couple of years so I want to make sure I will recognize these nogoodniks who commit the sin of playing together if they are in my matches. I checked the comp discord and the competitive play forum and don't see any clear identifiers of divisions and who might be among them, etc.

[Bud Crue]

Manboobs-sama, on 18 February 2025 - 05:09 AM, said:

\
Y'know I'd answer your question in earnest if I thought you weren't just being an intentionally pedantic *******.

Just by how you replied I know you know what I am talking about, so unless you respond with a modicum of respect, I have no interest in interacting with you.

I'm not going to drag certain people if I don't have to. All that matters is Groups are WILDLY unbalanced and there are dozens of ways to make this **** less so but every solo player just continually gets told to pound sand.

My apology. I'll try again. You are asserting that when a certain class of player, these folks in "Div-4", are in some way cheating when they drop together as a 4-man. I am merely trying to figure out who such people might be or for you to share how others might identify them, so that we too can observe whatever it is they are doing that has brought you to the point of accusing them of cheating. Nothing nefarious, or insulting here, I just want to know. I see some old comp folks dropping regularly, but they are rarely in more than 2-mans, and they often don't dominate or even turn the tide with their performance (sometimes they certainly do), so I must assume that there is a new crop of such folks lurking about and messing up games. Unless you share who these people are or how the rest of us can identify them and their groups, we will all remain ignorant and thus unable to avoid them ourselves.

[Ken Harkin]

Manboobs-sama, on 18 February 2025 - 05:42 AM, said:

....
All I want as a solo player is to be given a goddamn chance. I have seen more than my fair share of matches where I'm facing down an unbeatable 4-man.
....

I dropped plenty of times over the three day holiday weekend in the USA, every time a solo. I sit somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 into Tier 3. If I play pure "Best PSR Perfoming Mechs" I tend to do better than when I mix it up with less optimal builds, tests, or simply fun changes to mix up the classes I drop in based on population at the time.

In almost every game I felt I had a chance. A couple times I got ganked by coordinated lights when I was in an assault although I generally was able to manuever to avoid being unsupported to minimize that. In every drop I used VOIP to try to coordinate and it by far had a positive effect more often than no effect. Calling out CLEAR targets and reports using grid numbers gets results, not 100% of the time but more often than you may think. If you have someone on coms calling out a plan acknowledge it in VOIP. Communication is contagious. If people notice some doing it, and doing so effectively, they join in.

More than anything realize that luck works for and against you in every drop. Sometimes a high performing player or group is on your side, sometimes the other. Perhaps that opposition composed of skittles actually were simply communicating when they steam rollered you.

Play smart and communicate.

When in doubt, embrace the Fury Road mentality.
I LIVE, I DIE, I LIVE AGAIN!!!

Edited by Ken Harkin, 18 February 2025 - 07:23 AM.

[Rosarius]

Manboobs-sama, on 18 February 2025 - 02:07 AM, said:

When you do it a certain way, it ABSOLUTELY does. Running with a Div A 4-man is without question cheating, and I cannot even possibly imagine the fool who would defend it as not.

Could you please point to the specific clause in the Terms of Service / Code of Conduct that defines such behaviour as cheating?

[LordNothing]

worst thing that should happen to a skill stacked group is that they get deprioritized in queue until a worthy opponent can be found. that could be another similar group or enough t1 solos to compensate. the mm should do that automatically as it stands, that is if its working.

[Rosarius]

LordNothing, on 19 February 2025 - 01:40 PM, said:

worst thing that should happen to a skill stacked group is that they get deprioritized in queue until a worthy opponent can be found. that could be another similar group or enough t1 solos to compensate. the mm should do that automatically as it stands, that is if its working.

The match maker will see a group of T1 players as a T1 group who can match with anyone between T1 and T3. The thing is, the skill gap between the bottom of T1 to the top 100 players playing at any given time is huge and currently the match maker has no way of seeing this gap as it only looks at tier and nothing else.

Secondary lobby balancing could help fix this problem, but sadly PGI can't or won't allocate resources to it which makes sense from a business standpoint as it would be difficult to figure out if there might be a return on investment

[LordNothing]

tiers are really just ranges in psr value. any group can be rated by simply averaging the psr within it and then matching that with an equivalent average, whether grouped up or not. same applies to whole teams.

fundamentally there are really only up tier, down tier and mid tier matches, and each tends to span 3 tiers anyway. the mythical pure-tier match probibly doesn't exist, and if it does it only exists for the populous t3. they may have existed at one point, but its doubtful with current populations and estimates for how many people are in queue at any given time.

you also have to deal with the rule about not having t1s in down tier drops which means that a t1 with multiple t5s cannot be used to get the t1 into a down tier match. even if the average puts it in a mid tier match, it would still need to drop in an up tier match to keep t1s and t4s apart. given that this is the way matches actually form, i dont have much concern about high t1s vs low t1s since they will have t3s in their match anyway simply because t1 players are rare (and groups consisting entirely of 99th+ percentile playes would be exceedingly rare).

so what can the mm do in that case, they can give those 99th percentile players a bunch of 50th percentile players to carry. and give the other team enough high tier players to match team averages. then matching tonnage as an afterthought (probibly by swapping the t3 players with others with higher/lower tonnage mechs).

Edited by LordNothing, 19 February 2025 - 05:32 PM.

[Melphina]

Quote

When I see this **** in QP I report all 4 of you ***** as cheating every single time. I don't care what kind of silly mechs you are running to "Self-balance", you are ******* cheating. You are guaranteeing yourselves a win, and thus, removing the agency and fun of the other 20 players in the match.

Until Groups are removed, there is no such thing as balance There is no such thing as fairness, there is no such thing as fun, in QP.

Perhaps you should try joining a unit then. You should know that when there's a premade group on one side of the map, there's always a premade group on the other side of the map as well. Most of the time it will balance out as well as any odds are capable of.

I'm going to speak from personal experience here. I recently returned to the game after approximately 6 year hiatus. Jarl's list shows that I last played in July of 2018, and I returned in March of 2024. When I came back my old unit was gone and nobody on my friends list was still around. I had to make connections from scratch. I spent a couple months familiarizing myself with the gameplay again and started reaching out to others for a new unit, because I'm a casual player and all i want to do is spend a couple hours in the evening doing quick play with some friends. I found a small unit of 4-6 regulars, and most nights we end up dropping with just 2 or 3 people. They're fun people and that's the reason I stay around.

When I returned in March I was Tier 5, and most of the unit is Tier 5 as well. Since then I've climbed up to tier 1, so I know exactly what you're trying to insinuate. Let me speak from personal experience when I tell you that that isn't the case. You can check my Jarl's list history to verify these claims. Despite being a strong pilot myself, my experiences are no different than anyone elses. My Kill/death rate is close to 2.0, but my win/loss rate is around 0.95. So despite being a strong carry myself, we still end up losing more games than we win overall, but the ratio is still close to 1:1. Over the past months I consistently see premades on the opposing team whenever I drop with my unit, and over the course of countless matches we end up clashing with pretty even skill in the long run.

Individual matches end up being a landslide far too often. I get that. It's an unfortunate part of PvP with 12 people on each side. It's the law of numbers. All it takes is for one side to lose a couple players player early to swing the tide of battle heavily in one side's favor. a 12 versus 9 has a significant advantage and once you start snowballing sheer numbers make the downfall impossible to overcome. That can happen just from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I often hit match scores in the 550-600 range, but they're countered by matches where I get taken out early before I can do anything meaningful or matches where my whole team flops quickly and we end up overrun. In the end my average score is in the 250-290's range over the course of a month worth of 250-400 games played. The strong plays are countered by unfortunate setbacks, and it balances out.

All I want to do is play a few games casually with friends. I want to have fun, and I do. Even when my team is getting rocked I make the most of it and make my death as dramatic and meaningful as I can. That's all any of us can do. It's ******, I know. In a perfect world all games would be close and 10 v 12 kills, or 12 v 9 kills would be the norm. But that's not how FPS's work. Numbers matter more than anything, and one individual pilot is only a single factor in a game.

So I end with my original advice. If you aren't having fun, either set back and take a break (I do that too), or try joining a unit and sync dropping yourself. The experience is better for the company. This is a game meant for team play, with friends by your side. The whole point of the game is throwing big stompy robots with powerful guns and heavy artillery at each other and watching the chaos ensue. Take it at face value and either like it or don't. But don't tunnel vision into thinking you KNOW what's happening to every other player and what their own experiences are. I assure you, you don't. Our experiences are all pretty similar. It's just how we as individuals choose to accept them and handle them that sets us apart.

Edited by Melphina, 19 February 2025 - 11:15 PM.

[sycocys]

Comms off.

Now you have a single player game with random difficulty.

Is your enjoyment primarily on winning? Run a meta build or some sort of pulse laser vomit, wander about and force the match into your side's favor.

Rather have fun? Then run whatever you want and have fun. One of the last matches I played was a BJ-Arrow with 6 HMGs on Alpine. Probably about the worst build maybe other than spl or micro nova on that map. Had a good time, rang up some kills, blasted off 2.5 tons of MG ammo and can't even remember which side won.

[1453 R]

Please don't "Comms off". The biggest possible advantage you can give to the grouped players everyone claims to hate so much is to turn off the ability to communicate and coordinate with your team entirely. If they can talk to each other and you can't talk with anyone, they have an absolutely devastating edge over you that no amount of skill can really overcome.

Even if you never personally send a single message, vocally or over text, to anyone else in the match? Leave comms open enough to hear. Leave yourself able to hear callouts. Individually mute single specific yakslappers if you have to, nobody's gonna get anything useful from a CoD Kiddy anyways, but please do not globally mute/blank all comms. You become useless dead weight to literally everyone else in MWO if you do.